Some nice surprises

I'm still trying to maintain a fairly regular blogging schedule even though I'm back in Toronto, but I don't just want to blog when there's stuff that is either a) obvious, or b) covered to death by all the other Jays bloggers.

For example: I'm not writing much about the J.A. Happ/Ricky Romero battle for the 5th starting spot because it's been covered by literally the entire planet.  I'm also not just going to give blow-by-blow reports on the Jays boxscores because, well, it's pretty boring, and you can just go to a range of websites to look at the boxscore and game reports yourself.

Today, though, there were a couple of nice surprises that I'll cover briefly.

First, from other reports, Ricky didn't pitch all that badly.  Not really a surprise, but I thought it merited a mention.

Second, a couple of really interesting fellas made an appearance in the box score today.  First was Dustin McGowan.  From other sources, McGowan threw a clean inning and hit 93 on the radar gun, so all indications are that he's back on the fast track to recovery and could possibly start the season on a rehab assignment before the team has to make a decision on what to do with him.  McGowan is out of options, so if he's going to get a regular minor league assignment he'd have to clear waivers first, and I"m sure if McGowan is healthy and throwing the way he can, he wouldn't get through without being claimed.

The other interesting name to show up in the box score was Marcus Stroman's.  Stroman, as many of you may remember, was ranked #3 on my top 20 prospect list.  He threw 2 hitless innings, giving up one walk and striking out two batters.  I saw Stroman throw Live BP while I was in Florida and the kid has major league quality stuff.  The plan is to stretch him out as a starter, but he has a lot of time to be able to do that.  He still has about 42 or 43 games remaining on his suspension, so there's not a big problem in him throwing only 2 innings this late in spring training.  He's not shooting for an April start to his season -- he's got until about the middle of May before he needs to be ready.  And knowing how the Blue Jays like to take it easy on their minor leaguers arms, having him throwing 2 innings in a big league spring game is probably just starting to get him spooled up to start when his suspension is up.

Other highlights from the game today included another HR from Adam Lind and Rajai Davis.  Both guys have been hitting well in the spring, and here's hoping that Lind especially carries this success over when the regular season starts next week.

Alrighty, that's my brief addition to the Blue Jays Blogosphere for today!  Happy Passover!